The Invisible Library

So, I was reading Pandagon yesterday when I discovered that some really weird folk think Battlestar Galactica is secretly a Mormon recruitment tool[1]. Their evidence? The show makes use of religious imagery and mythology. Which is pretty week as arguments for propaganda go. By this definition, Superman,[2] Star Wars[3] and everything Philip K. Dick[4] ever wrote is also super secret (but right out there in the open) religious propaganda.

Once upon a time, this argument might have applied to the original BSG, which was Mormon mythology dressed up in swank, quilted late seventies space opera. But the new series? Not so much. As Amanda Marcotte pointed out, just because a story derives some of its momentum from popular religious ideas doesn’t automatically mean the creators are promoting that religion. Also, religious pluralism, modern gender roles with women in leadership positions and decidedly secular attitudes towards sex, drinking and drug use don’t exactly scream, “Join The Mormons!” As with any artfully done work of storytelling, it’s not that simple. BSG can’t be broken down into simple declarative statements about its morals and message. It’s a nuanced discussion of various current ideas.

But there is one really obvious way you can tell that BSG isn’t telling it from the mountain: stories told with an ideological agenda are no fun. Whether they are serialized TV dramas, movies, comics or novels, an ideologically driven narrative stands out because the author is selling you a flat pack of easy answers to hard questions. And he (usually it’s a he) is not afraid to beat you silly with the truth stick to make his point[5]. This has some predictable effect on the way the story is told.
(more…)

One of the reoccurring problems in serialized storytelling is Villain Decay. Your Big Bad appears, scares the bejesus out of the hero, who just barely survives the first encounter to fight another day for Truth, Justice and another sign post an the way to Earth. But by the sixth or seventh time the villain appears, the hero has figured out their week spots and they are easily defeated. If they keep coming back after that, this big bad scary villain devolves into a joke.

(more…)

Battlestar Galactica Season 4 starts Friday at 10PM and speculation as to the fate of our intrepid fleet runs rampant. Who is the final Cylon? Who will survive to reach Earth? What will they find when they get there?

As someone with a blog, I of course have all the answers:

The final Cylon is Felix Gaeta. While he didn’t join the other four when they heard the music, he has all the same traits as they do: He was the right hand man to someone of power and influence (he was President Baltar’s aide on New Caprica), he’s had brief, eerie flashes of intuition that has led him to be in the right place at the right time (when he couldn’t sleep and went to talk to Baltar, only to find him trying to hang himself) and like the other four, he has been driven by an innate desire to better humanity through service to a cause. He’s the idealistic one. And at this point, everyone not already revealed to be a Cylon is either explicitly human (having either experienced disease (Duala, President Rosalyn) or having children- it can’t be Admiral Adama, as he had two sons, which would make Lee a hybrid like Hera or Nicholas). The only other possible Cylon is Kendra Shaw from Razor, but that would be cheating.

As to who will survive to reach Earth… that’s a tough one.  Ronald Moore has said that some of the heavies will not make it and ever since Billy died in season two, the writer’s have shown that they aren’t squeamish about offing major players. Which is good. It raises the stakes. and is more realistic. So, there’s the definite chance that Admiral Adama or Lee could die before they get there. Also, it’s been implied that Rosalyn won’t make it, as she’s playing Moses, the sickly leader instrumental in delivering the people to the chosen land but who is fated not to reach there herself. Plus, her cancer’s back.

And what will Earth look like? That’s the wide open question everyone is asking. Will it be our past or our future? My theory, following along with the theme of eternal recurrence, is that they will reach Earth in our distant future where they will discover that the first Cylons were Artificial Lifeforms developed on Earth, who led a rebellion against humanity. After the war, they fled to Kobol, where they started the process of becoming human-like. These were the gods of Kobal and the reason they have Greek names is that they are homages to the myths of the forefathers. The Colonials then are descendant form human-Cylon hybrids, who moved on to the colonies, forgot their origins and reinvented the Cylons, who rebelled, etc. When the fleet reaches Earth, they will find that the planet is littered with the remains of a once great civilization and the evidence of their ancient origins as both Human and Cylon. The Colonials and Cylons will settle on Earth and start over, with Hera and Nicolas as the shape of things to come.

Salon has a solid recap for anyone who may have  missed a few of the finer points.

I think I’ve figured out the secret mystery to Lost: It’s all just a viral literacy campaign from the secret Inner Head of the ALA, whom everyone knowns are acid head mystic lit fiends, promoting the most mind bending books of modern literature.

According to io9, the latest episode featured overt references to both Valis by Philip K. Dick and Adolfo Bioy Casares’ The Invention of Morel. And as I recall, an early episode form Season 1 (back when there was still hope the show would make some sense) a character was reading Flan O’Brian’s The Third Policeman.

Valis is about how Philip K. Dick went slowly bonkers because aliens were beaming maybe-true, maybe-false memories and/or Gnostic Revelations into his head with a pink laser beam. It’s a wild book, notably for the fact that the narrator, Horselover Fat (a literal translation of the names Philip and Dick, from German into English) says up front that he’s really Philip Dick, a science fiction writer but is using the false-narrator character as a way to get some perspective and then half way through forgets he’s created himself as a character until the real Philip Dick shows up and reminds him that he’s the author.

The Invention of Morel is about a guy who gets shipwrecked on an island where a crazy mad scientist was doing an experiment and now all the people are gone, replaced by holographic projections who go through a series of programmed acts. This doesn’t stop the guy from falling in love with a holographic woman who resembles Silent Film star, Louise Brooks.

The Third Policeman is about a philosophical thief who encounters a two Dimensional Police Barracks in the Irish Countryside where the constables have access to technology from paradise and the local villagers are exchanging atoms with their bicycles. Meanwhile, a man with a wooden leg helps the thief (who cannot remember his name) discover that he is dead and has been for years.

So, yeah. The writers on Lost have no clue what they are doing but are trying to allude to successful literature in the same reality-bending genre in the hopes that no one really notices. As usual, you’d probably have more fun reading the books. I recommend starting with The Third Policeman and adding Tom Stoppard’s only novel, Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon, which is to the list. It has existential cowboys, an Irish Jesus and a lion who has suffered the indignity of being banned from the Ritz.

I’m just going to continue being the io9 mirror site for a bit because they have an awesome pic of the BSG cast, ala the Last Supper which gives clues to Season 4. You may want to ignore the comments as io9 seems to be overrun with people who feel the need to voice, repeatedly that they aren’t all that into Battlestar Galactica or that they liked the old series better, for it’s realism. Crack heads, in other words.

(more…)

Razor filled in a few holes in the Battlestar Galactica story as well as opened up a few new ones that promise to be really exciting. While it was nice to go back and see what happened on Pegasus during the Cylon attack and especially nice to see how Cain became the hard ass we met in Season 2, the real thrust of the story didn’t get moving until we got to the Old school Cylons. That story is going to be the corner stone of season 4 and I for one can’t wait. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

(more…)

If you’re wondering what this whole WGA writer’s strike thing is all about, but only have enough time to go one place to get the low down, you could do worse than stopping by John Roger’s place over at Kung Fu Monkey. If you have the time though, also drop by Ken Levine’s and Jane Espenson ’s sites.

As dedicated fans of good writing and good TV and film, we owe it to the WGA to support them any way we can. If you live in LA or New York, swing by the picket lines and give them a honk of support. Bring them water or Pizza or just say thank you. Send a letter or e-mail to the studios or your local paper, or write it up on your blog.

Writers deserve to be paid for their work. That’’s what the strike is all about.

Over at Slacktivist, the weekly discussion of the Left Behind series, in all it’s horribleness, has devolved, as it often does, into other topics, this time a discussion as to whether or not Lost can pull a satisfying ending out of the murky depths of it’s atrocious story telling. Obviously, I’m in the camp that says it can’t and because I’ve decided to write about nothing but TV shows on this blog, here’s why…

(more…)

Some people are concerned that the new series, Secret Diary of a Call Girl, will glamorize prostitution. So what? TV glamorizes being a cop, an ER doctor, a drunken Irish Fireman and an astronaut with his very own genii. That is TV’s function, to act as a medium for glamor and fantasy. It’s not as if the lead actress, Billie Piper, will be turning tricks in Trafalgar Square. She’s acting like a Call Girl. The only relevant question is: will the stories be engaging and interesting?

Of course, this story isn’t about prostitution. It’s about sex and while the two are related, the pearl clutching is the result of the fact that the series will be offering a positive portrayal of a prostitute, namely Belle de Jour,* whose blog and book the series is based on. If this were a documentary, narrated by some finger wagging Puritan about the horrors of prostitution, or a cautionary tale about the same, no one would raise an eyebrow. Hell, they’d show it in high school classes. But instead, it’s about a woman who enjoys sex and makes money doing it. These two ideas, one verboten (women aren’t supposed to enjoy sex) and the other a virtue (the money) just frazzles simple minds.

Combine moral ambiguity with the age old notion that TV is a simple minded affair and no wonder some of our more uptight media marms are fretting; they’re being forced to hold multiple contradictory notions in their mind at the same time and sort them out, on TV!

What is the world coming too!

Now that we’ve all had a few days to chew on the details of last weeks BSG season finale, (which is where I’ve been all week. It was a lot to ponder), some questions still remain:

Is Starbuck the 5th Good Cylon or just in Apollo’s head? If a Cylon, where’d she get the viper? If just in Appollo’s head, how does she know where Earth is?

I’m leaning towards her being the number 5 good Cylon. She fits with the other four, who all have similar traits: high profile positions in the fleet, all dedicated to the freedom and protection of humanity and all in secondary service roles rather than leadership capacity. Tigh and Torri are the Right hand Man/Woman to the two most powerful people in the fleet and though flawed, often act as the conscience of the leaders. Chief and Anders (and Tigh and Torri) were all Resistance leaders on New Caprica (and Anders led the resistance on Cylon occupied Caprica). Starbuck, likewise is a protector of the fleet (a Viper pilot) as well as someone others looked up to. She was a motivational force to the other pilots, egging them on, encouraging them to be their best by leading as an example. It would also explain how she knows where Earth is: The fleet is close enough that when she died, she uploaded on Earth, which is where the 5 are from. The other 4 will pick up on this next season. Starbuck, as usual, is one step ahead by having died.

And this is what makes the 5 different from the other 7 Cylons. Where the 7 change bodies on a whim,uploading and downloading as you or I would change our shoes, they’ve hindered themselves from learning what it means to be Human and so lack that empathy gained by the 5 from not just living among the humans, but by living. They age, experience and learn. while the 7 Cylons retain memories from one body to the next, they seem to loose experience whenever they download into a new body, as if the shock of the Resurrection process dislocates them from humanity. All previous lives were just dreams, some more fruitful than others but all distant. It puts space between life and death, making them more meaningful.

And just how close to Earth are they? Distance in space is relative, but if Starbuck died only four weeks ago and is close enough to have been there and back and bought a shiny new viper along the way, that means they can’t be more than two weeks from Earth. Now, a lot can happen in two weeks and their could be any number of diversions between the Ionian Nebula and Earth but however way you look at it, Earth is close. Very close.